Michele F. Margolis. From Politics to the Pews: How Partisanship and the Political Environment Shape Religious Identity.

Abstract

It is a remarkable achievement to take long-standing conventional wisdom and produce a logical, simple, and compelling causal story that flips that wisdom on its head, and then to systematically provide evidence for this story using old and new data. In Michele Margolis's book, not only are we forced to reexamine our prior understanding of a key causal process in religion and politics, but we are given a framework to better understand the origin and impact of social group identities within the larger political context.